38: The Study of "Dead Jews"

Raul Hilberg was a Jewish émigré from Nazi-occupied Vienna who helped begin the field of Holocaust studies with his long and minutely detailed 1961 study of the massacre of European Jews. In his landmark work, The Destruction of the European Jews, Mr. Hilberg said the Holocaust had been the result of a huge bureaucratic machine with thousands of participants, not the fulfillment of a preconceived plan or a single order by Hitler.

As uncountable separate instructions were passed on, formally and informally, to a range of actors that included train schedulers and gas chamber architects, responsibility became ever more diluted, he argued, even as the machinery of death churned inexorably ahead.

"For these reasons, an administrator, clerk or uniformed guard never referred to himself as a perpetrator," Mr. Hilberg said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune in 1992. "He realized, however, that the process of destruction was deliberate, and that once he had stepped into this maelstrom, his deed would be indelible."

Though some critics said Mr. Hilberg had understated the impact of historic German anti-Semitism, his broad conclusions were based on painstaking research. He examined microfilm of thousands upon thousands of prosaic documents like train schedules and memorandums between minor officials.

"This head-against-the-wall technique is the only virtue I can parade without blushing," he said last year when Germany gave him with its Order of Merit, the highest tribute it can pay to someone who is not a German citizen.

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that Mr. Hilberg's book "reveals, methodically, fully and clearly, the development of both the technical and psychological process; the machinery and mentality whereby one whole society sought to isolate and destroy another, which, for centuries, had lived in its midst."

Mr. Trevor-Roper called the book's most surprising revelation, and its least welcome one, its suggestion that at least some Jews cooperated in their own annihilation. Examples included Jews who had helped organize deportations or led victims to gas chambers. Mr. Hilberg argued that Jews had a long history of passivity and that some had mistakenly calculated that the Nazis would not destroy what they could economically exploit.

Many historians, survivors and Jewish leaders disagreed, pointing to examples of Jewish resistance. But Holocaust historians of all views began using terminology Mr. Hilberg had devised, including that of calling the Holocaust's principals perpetrators, victims and bystanders.

Raul Hilberg was born on June 2, 1926, in Vienna. In his memoir, "The Politics of Memory: Journey of a Holocaust Historian" (1996), he said his father, Michael, had been a "middleman," someone who bought household goods for people needing credit and paid him in installments. In 1938, the occupying Nazis arrested him but released him because he was a World War I veteran.

The Hilbergs emigrated to Brooklyn, where Michael worked in a factory and Raul attended Lincoln High School. His studies at Brooklyn College were interrupted when he was drafted into the Army. His unit was housed in the Nazi Party's former offices in Munich, where Mr. Hilberg was fascinated by crates containing Hitler's personal library.

He returned to Brooklyn College, where he quit chemistry for political science and history. He went on to Columbia, where he insisted on writing his doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust, which few academics were studying. His adviser, Franz Neumann, warned him that his choice of subject might be his academic funeral. At least five publishers rejected his major book.

Some publishers found the 700-page manuscript unwieldy. Others didn't like his reliance on German sources or took issue with his views on Jewish accommodation. It was published by a small Chicago house after a wealthy patron agreed to buy 1,300 copies to go to libraries.

His caustic personal style, which contrasted with the monotone of his histories, did not always help. When academics asked about his subject area, Mr. Hilberg was prone to reply, "I study dead Jews."

He next taught at Hunter College and landed a federal job helping to catalog documents being released from German archives. He copied material by hand so he could use it for his own research. The multitudinous materials Mr. Hilberg examined convinced him that those very documents were the strongest argument against those who contended the Holocaust had never happened, he told The International Herald Tribune in 1996.

"These individuals are not familiar with the archives, or they would see that nobody could forge these millions of documents," he said.

A longtime professor at the University of Vermont, Hilberg was considered the dean of Holocaust studies for his meticulous portrait of the "machinery of destruction" that annihilated more than 5 million European Jews during World War II.

"Raul Hilberg's work and great opus, 'The Destruction of the European Jews,' set the standard and created the foundation for the development of the whole field of Holocaust studies," said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Hilberg's groundbreaking book, which drew on mountains of documents from the Nuremberg trials, demonstrated the systematic nature of the Nazi slaughter. He also wrote Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (1992), which examined the vast bureaucracy of accountants, guards, engineers, architects and other anonymous workers whose cooperation enabled German dictator Adolf Hitler's killing machine to roll relentlessly in service of gruesome ends. In defining what Shapiro called "the three roles of human beings in the genocidal situation," the latter work created a framework for future scholars to follow.

He came to his life's work through tragedy and luck. After his father's arrest in Austria in 1938, following the Anchluss, his family fled to Cuba, then to New York City. After high school, Hilberg was drafted into the U.S. Army and returned to Europe. His division helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp. He also assisted in the hunt for German documents that could be used in the prosecution of war crimes. While stationed in Munich at the former Nazi party headquarters, Hilberg discovered crates containing Hitler's private library. He later worked for a project to organize and microfilm captured German
documents. That archive became the foundation for Holocaust research, including his own landmark study.

After attending Brooklyn College, he entered Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in 1950 and a doctorate in 1955. One of his Columbia professors, Franz Neumann, taught classes about bureaucracy, particularly how the development of a nation like Germany relied on the labor of a vast system of functionaries.

"That idea sparked a similar one in my mind," Hilberg told the Chicago Tribune some years ago. "I grasped that the Holocaust could only have been possible through the efforts of a similar bureaucracy, which must have left its records too."

Hilberg's book told a story that many did not want to hear. He carefully chronicled the monstrous nature of the Nazi drive to exterminate the Jews but also argued that Jews did little to help themselves. He contested the widely accepted view that some 6 million Jews were killed, arguing the number was closer to 5.1 million, and he concentrated his analysis on the actions of the Nazis, giving short shrift, his critics said, to the victims. Some of the most pointed criticism came from Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial institute.

The Destruction of the European Jews was revised and expanded into a three-volume work in 1985 and remains what Shapiro called "the most consulted, fundamental work" in the field. It was later published in Germany, where Hilberg became a popular lecturer addressing a younger generation of Germans struggling to absorb the enormity of their forebears' ghastly scheme.